


Circuit

by jmtorres



Category: Quantum Leap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-29
Updated: 2004-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 12:32:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/356826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmtorres/pseuds/jmtorres
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Conceptual AU: what if leaping wasn't a simple one-to-one exchange?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circuit

Things started to unravel when Sam leaped into his teenaged self. Up until then, the leaps' effects upon Sam's hosts' lives had been disastrous, but not paradox-inducing. In the months that followed, Ziggy monitored the changes in Sam's history as a parade of personalities leaped through his sixteenth year, slowly encroaching on his acceptance at M.I.T. and everything that followed from that, including the conception of Project Quantum Leap.

Tom Stratton filled in for Sam in the last few days of November. He got Sam into trouble for underage drinking, but managed to repair some of the damage Sam had done to his own relationship with his brother in trying to talk him out of going to Vietnam. December opened with Ken Fox. Sam's grades suffered that week but the school coach was thrilled with him. Gerald Bryant got Sam a girlfriend and got into a fight with his English teacher over the merits of Joyce. Kid Cody leaped into the middle of the argument and hauled off and punched the guy, earning a week's worth of out of school suspension. The latter half of that week was patiently served out by Doc Young. Doc spent most of his time in the barn with the cows. Frankie La Palma leaped in just in time for Christmas break. Incensed at being told to shovel manure, he killed Sam's father. 

Frankie had figured out he could stop worrying about being caught, since he always leaped within a couple of days, anyway. He'd been killing people for the hell of it ever since he'd passed from his fleeting return to his own life into Don Geno's life, and he'd realized the leaps weren't going to stop. This meant pretty much every leapee on the circuit after Frankie landed in jail, court, prison, or a mental institution.

Teenage Sam ended up in an institution. Ziggy reported he would spend the rest of his life there, baffling doctors with the unending stream of personalities leaping through him.

And yet, Project Quantum Leap still existed. Ziggy was still around to report, and Al was still there to boggle at the report. Causality had been interrupted. The timeline was in breach. Paradox had occurred.

Al didn't tell Sam. Sam still thought he was doing good. Sam thought his leaps were straight swaps--that his hosts spent a few days in his body in the future, then returned to their own lives. That's what it had looked like in the beginning. Tom Stratton had done just that, leaped back into his own life when Sam had leaped out to Ken Fox.

And then Tom Stratton had leaped again, when Sam leaped. Tom Stratton had leaped into Ken Fox. Ken Fox had leaped into Tom Stratton. Sam had leaped into Gerald Bryant. Ziggy and Al scratched their heads over that until Sam leaped again, and realized the pattern was becoming a circuit, when Sam leaped from Gerald Bryant into Kid Cody: Gerald Bryant leaped from Sam into Tom Stratton. Ken Fox leaped from Tom Stratton into his own life. Tom Stratton leaped from Ken Fox into Gerald Bryant.

Ziggy described it mathematically at one point: if you numbered all the people Sam had leaped into, and let n equal the total number of leaps to date, then at any given time, a leapee's position in the circuit could be determined by subtracting their number from n. Therefore, Tom Stratton, the first leapee, was always at the n minus one position, the person Sam had just vacated. Leapee n, whomever Sam was currently in, was in position n minus n, or zero: Sam Beckett.

It was about then that Al made Ziggy shut up. He couldn't think of the leapees as numbers and variables. He also wasn't fond of the idea that Sam was a zero, no matter how much mathematical sense the model made. 

No one leaped back into their own life when Sam leaped out--they all leaped into Tom Stratton's, and then Ken Fox's, and then Gerald Bryant's, and then Kid Cody's, and then everyone else Sam had leaped into, in sequence. The most terrible thing about the circuit was that they eventually did leap into themselves for a few days, only to find leapees before them had been so lost and confused that their lives were in chaos. And then they leaped again, probably never to return to their own lives again.

Ziggy suggested that teenage Sam would somehow pen the string theory of quantum leaping during the brief period he would eventually return to his own life, as an explanation for what had happened to him, and that some charitable soul would build the accelerator based on his theory and put him into it, restarting the leaps and restoring causality. The problem with that was, it wasn't how Al remembered Project Quantum Leap getting started. It wasn't how adult Sam remembered it either, and the Swiss cheese effect wasn't enough to account for that.

Then the swiss cheese had a new and terrifying effect on Sam. He had leaped into a mental patient named Sam Bederman, and started displaying personalities of people he'd leaped into. Al's first thought was that Sam had leaped without their knowing and Al was watching the effects of circuit of leapers behind Sam. Except that the first personality who showed up was Samantha Stormer, not Tom Stratton.

Samantha Stormer should be number fourteen. Ziggy ran a quick check. Samantha Stormer was right where she should be, in Harry Spontini in July of 1974, and connecting with his ex-wife and daughter, something none of the men who had leaped through ahead of her had managed.

The Sam Bederman leap hit a little too close to home anyway--it was a little too close to what happened to all of them, after Sam leaped out. And then the next leap hit even closer to home.

The next leap put Al on the circuit.

It was a bizarre, three-way leap that did something kinky to Ziggy's algebra. Sam was in Al; Tom Jarret was in Sam; Al was in Tom Jarret. (Tom Stratton was in Sam Bederman and vice versa.) Then Sam leaped into Tom Jarret to save Al, which put Al into Sam in the waiting room, and Tom Jarret into Tom Stratton back in 1957. And Tom Stratton was in Al.

Al and Tom Stratton did not have time for words, because Sam leaped within minutes. Everyone moved along the circuit. Tom Stratton leaped into Tom Jarret. Al leaped into Tom Stratton's old life, and out of PQL for the foreseeable future. And Ken Fox leaped into Al.

Ziggy was flummoxed for nearly a third of a second. Then she told Gooshie to shove Ken Fox in the imaging chamber and make him read the handlink to Sam, because there was nothing else to be done for it. So Gooshie did.

Sam couldn't see Ken Fox, he could only see Al. This was because the physical sensors recording the observer's image could only see Al's aura, so it was all they could transmit to Sam. But Sam could still tell something was wrong. It didn't stop being wrong either, as the leaps went on and "Al's" behavior got stranger.

Paradox had reached Project Quantum Leap. It had stopped being an ivory tower in time, somehow immune to the causality of its conception. It was unraveling from the inside.

And on the outside, Sam was slowly going crazy.

**Author's Note:**

> Also [on dreamwidth](http://jmtorres.dreamwidth.org/519311.html).


End file.
